Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide  | Who are you writing for?

One thing that’s difficult about writing a book is its scope.

• There is a lot of material to organize.
• It’s too big to hold in your head.
• It’s hard to maintain your motivation when you won’t see a finished product for a long time.

In my experience of working with writers, as the project progresses the challenge becomes limiting the scope. Organizing all that material means making difficult decisions about what needs to be in the book and what doesn’t.

The tendency of humanities scholars to refer to their research and their book interchangeably makes this task even more difficult. The book is one output from a larger programme of research. Although the topic of a monograph is not as limited as that of a book chapter or journal article, it still requires focus and a clear through line. Whether or not you refer to your contribution as an argument, it must have a clear focus.

Writing, revising, or referring back to a book proposal can really help with this challenge. Your book proposal is a record of decisions about the scope of the book. A well written synopsis will make the overall aim of the whole book clear. Chapter level synopses will define the purpose of each chapter and indicate how it contributes to the larger aim, and how each chapter relates to others.

Writing those synopses is also challenging. It requires making the decisions about the scope, clearing away the detail and interesting related issues. So how do you make those decisions?

The early stages of the writing process is about your research: what kinds of claims you can make, and how you might organize the materials to support those claims.

Once you are reasonably confident about this, your focus shifts. You are no longer writing for yourself. The book manuscript you submit to a publisher is communicating your research to a particular audience. You are now writing for your reader.

There is a whole section of the book proposal that is all about clarifying your answer to the question “Who is the intended reader?”. Your publisher might label this section of the proposal something like “marketing questionnaire”.

The writing process: A recap

In The Scholarly Writing Process (A Short Guide), I propose that there are 2 broad stages to the process. Initially you are writing to figure out what you want to say and what you can say based on the research you have done.

That writing may or may not look like a book or an article. It may be a mind map. Detailed research notes. An outline that gets increasingly more detailed. Freewriting that lacks structure. Or freewriting within a broad structure.

The key thing about this early stage of the writing process is that it’s about your research, what kinds of claims you can make, and how you might organize the materials to support those claims.

Once you are reasonably confident about this, your focus shifts. You are no longer writing for yourself. You are now writing for your reader. The book manuscript you submit to a publisher is communicating your research to a particular audience.

Once you are in this second phase of the process, it is the reader’s needs that will drive some of the decisions you make about the content. Things like:

• What can you reasonably expect the reader to know?
• What kind of evidence will the reader want to see for your claims?
• How much detail is required?

Some of the things you needed to write (or read) in the first phase of the process will no longer be needed. You will need to add things that connect what you want to say about your research to things your readers are already familiar with and interested in.

Although I’ve talked about 2 distinct phases, there is a transitional phase in which you go back and forth between these 2 perspectives. Thinking about the reader may send you back to your research to figure out what can be said. Then you’ll go back to the reader’s needs and realize you can be more concise, or skip whole paragraphs or sections.

Who is this reader?

There is a whole section of the book proposal that is all about clarifying your answer to this question. Your publisher needs to know about the readers so they can make sure they know the book exists and how to buy it. The publisher calls that marketing, and might label this section of the proposal something like “marketing questionnaire”.

You might be put off by the term “marketing”. That’s understandable. You may also have some unhelpful ideas about what is being asked of you here. The publisher usually asks for books that are comparable or in competition with your book. That kind of language wakes up the gremlins that like to tell you you’re not good enough. And then you either get discouraged about your ability to write a publishable book, or you get defensive, or some combination of the two.

Thinking about marketing and competition is generally not helpful to academic writers.

How readers purchase books

You are also a reader. Your colleagues and friends are readers. You may not be confident about “marketing” but you do know something about how readers find books and decide whether to read them, and how to acquire them.

When you go to the library or a bookstore, do you think the books are in competition with each other?

The book readers I know are more likely to think about how many they can take home today, rather than how few. Constraints usually include things like budget (if buying), arm strength, and how many they can read before they need to be returned (if borrowing).

Acquisitions librarians are building collections.

Librarians have budget and space constraints. The library will have clear criteria for the aims of the library in terms of subjects covered, types of readers, and so on. Buying decisions are then likely to be about how many books in each subject they can have, to provide appropriate breadth and depth. This is why you sometimes have to travel to another library to access their more comprehensive collection in a particular area.

As you can see, you don’t have to demonstrate that this book would be purchased instead of another one. And you don’t have to worry that there are already other books on the same subject.

If you like this, you’ll also like …

The readers of your book read other books. You can clarify who your reader is by thinking about the other books they read. You might want to do this by going to the bookstore.

• Where would your book be shelved? 

Stand in front of that shelf (physically or in your imagination) and look at what else is on that shelf. This is harder to do online, but if you can imagine one book that you think would be shelved next to yours, search for it in your favourite online bookseller and see what else is suggested. (These may be things in the same category or what is referred to as “also bought”.)

You might also look at publishers catalogues for all of the publishers that might be a good fit for your book. What else are they publishing that is like your book?

This exercise will get you a list of recently published books (and a few classics in the field that get reprinted).

Doing the same thing in the library will enable you to think about where your book fits in a longer trajectory of scholarship on this topic. Your publisher may or may not want to know about these older books, but listing them will help you build a picture of who your reader is, what the conversation you are contributing looks like, and where your book will fit in.

Group the list by reader

You don’t have to figure out how to reach the largest number of readers. You need to figure out which readers you really want to reach.

This is your field. You know enough about these books to be able to roughly group them based on what kind of reader is most likely to be interested in them. Some books will give a broad overview. Others will be more detailed. Some will require considerable knowledge of the field already (or willingness to acquire it), whereas others may be a good way in.

Trust your intuition as you group them, then try to articulate what the books in each group have in common. Who would read the books in each group? Why would they pick them up?

Since we are talking about scholarly books, you might also want to consider which disciplines these readers are in and what difference that makes.

Hopefully the fact that you’ve got a few groups helps you see that you don’t have to target all of these readers to get published. Some of the others may also pick up your book, but you aren’t writing it for them.

• Which group would your book go in? 

How this helps you

Doing this exercise before you select a publisher is ideal. That way you are approaching a publisher that is already reaching the audience you want to reach. The acquisitions editor will likely have knowledge of the readers that will enable them to give you good suggestions about your book project. And they’ll have connections with appropriate peer reviewers.

More than that, this exercise helps you decide things that make a big difference to the scope of your project.

• How much detail do these readers need?
• What context can you go over relatively lightly because they are familiar with it?
• What context do you need to go into in more detail so they understand your contribution?
• What needs to go in the introduction to situate your research in relation to what they already know?
• What conclusions might be most relevant to this readership?

As you can see, these questions about the reader will also help you refine your synopsis. Pat Thomson’s “tiny text” strategy may be a useful way to draft a synopsis of the book, and each of the chapters, and consider how to present your contribution to the readers you have identified.

Your book is not your research. Accept that this book is just one publication. You will probably write other things. You can keep researching and writing about the bigger topic, even after you’ve published this book.